Jennifer Lewin: Wild Work, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Klappentext

Insightful and thought-provoking, Jennifer Lewin's Wild Work: Dreams in Early Modern English Literature offers a novel lens through which to view the literary treatment of dreams, sleep, and related states of consciousness. Wild Work argues for the centrality of dreaming and related sleep states to how epistemological certainty was understood in early modern English literature and culture. When literary characters share their dreams or find themselves unable to sleep, their conditions do not lead to expressions of doubt but rather the opposite: the nighttime world has an extraordinary power to generate memorable and believable mental experience. Far from being considered ephemeral or trivial, these phenomena consistently highlighted the inextricability of the imagination and sense experience in knowledge formation.

Exploring works from a range of authors including Edmund Spenser, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Lady Mary Wroth, and John Milton, Lewin grounds each analysis in theological, philosophical, and experiential accounts of the somnolent states that shaped writers' work. Wild Work calls for scholars and readers to consider dreams in early modern literature as indispensable to understanding early modern culture itself.